On Monday, May 30, 2011, Linus Torvalds wrote:> Yay! Let the bikeshed painting discussions about version numbering> begin (or at least re-start).> > I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0. It> will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse> enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can> no longe rcomfortably count as high as 40.> > The whole renumbering was discussed at last years Kernel Summit, and> there was a plan to take it up this year too. But let's face it -> what's the point of being in charge if you can't pick the bike shed> color without holding a referendum on it? So I'm just going all> alpha-male, and just renumbering it. You'll like it.> > Now, my alpha-maleness sadly does not actually extend to all the> scripts and Makefile rules, so the kernel is fighting back, and is> calling itself 3.0.0-rc1. We'll have the usual 6-7 weeks to wrestle it> into submission, and get scripts etc cleaned up, and the final release> should be just "3.0". The -stable team can use the third number for> their versioning.> > So what are the big changes?> > NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver> changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is> *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a> Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at> all like that. We've been doing time-based releases for many years> now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the> renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one ("20 years")> instead.> > So no ABI changes, no API changes,